Now I love books as much as the next guy, but the thought of spending my life with an ISBN on my neck freaks me out. It's not that I'm squeamish about announcing my reading tastes to the world; I've been keeping a public reading list for years. Nor is that I don't like long numbers; I do—very much so—and in fact my favorite number is 65,536 (216).

I think for me, my biggest issue is the fact that ISBNs identify specific manifestations of a book, rather than the work itself. I first read many of my favorite books in cheap editions, which I then went go on to upgrade as new printings come out. Which edition to choose? Do I really want to single out a particular mass market paperback edition as worthy of being immortalized on my body? Sadly, there's no work-level identifier scheme that really meets my needs: library-oriented systems like LCCNs are still too granular, and most other systems are proprietary and have uncertain lifespans. Who wants that?

Alas, I may just have to find other ways of showing my love for my favorite books, other than tattooing ISBNs on my neck. With much respect for Michael S.' adventurous friend, I think I'll stick to name-dropping titles, the old-fashioned way.

June 19, 2008

Enjoyed reading “The ISBN as SKU”, Peter Brantley’s blog post on how publishers may deal with having intermediaries (e.g. resellers) assign their own ISBNs to specific editions or variants of a work, possibly without the publisher’s knowledge:

“Already, publishers are making a single EPUB digital book package, and then leaving the proliferation of more discrete ebook reader formats to intermediaries, distributors and wholesalers. Ingram will make the XYZ, Amazon will make the Kindle format, etc. The publisher is only responsible for one file, the .epub package…We are rapidly jerking forwards into a near term future where ISBNs will be assigned for derivative digital book products by intermediaries, not publishers. As an astute colleague observed in New York, the ISBN becomes a product SKU.” (More…)

The followup comments from folks in and around the book trade are particularly interesting.

All traditional 10-digit ISBNs can be represented in a 13-digit form, by prepending 978 and recalculating the last digit:

0007149824 -> 9780007149827

Conversely, You can work back from any 978-prefixed 13-digit ISBN back the the 10-digit ISBN, by removing the 978 and recalculating the last digit:

9780007149827 -> 0007149824

But 13-digit ISBNs that start with other numbers, like 979, can’t be converted back down to 10 digits:

9790007149827 -> ?

The first 13-digit ISBNs on the market have been 978s, easily convertible back to 10 digits. This made it easy for many businesses to get started dealing with 13-digit ISBNs; they could just rewrite them as 10-digit ISBNs and keep going.

But with the introduction of 979s, there are no shortcuts anymore. Publishers, booksellers, distributors, libraries, collectors — anyone at all who uses ISBN codes — will need to be able to accommodate the new 13-digit ISBN. The transition’s taken much longer than initially planned; it’ll be interesting to see if it’ll be pushed back even further as 2008 approaches, as it’s been before.

November 17, 2006

Like everyone else in the book industry, we’ve been working to transition our systems to ISBN-13. Given the level of panic we’ve been encountering from vendors struggling with ISBN-13 compliance, it seems like for some, this could be their own in-house version of the Y2K problem.

The sky may not be falling just yet.

While January 1 is the date when we’ve been told to expect seeing natively 13-digit ISBNs in the wild, the November 17 issue of the Book Industry Study Group Bulletin offers some hope:

“Brian Green, who manages the International ISBN Agency, was keen to emphasize to delegates how difficult it is at this stage to be precise, but he said that late 2007 or early 2008 was a reasonable estimate of when we might see the first 979s.”

While this is no reason to slow down ISBN-13 compliance work, it suggests that systems won’t melt down when people try to order the first newly published book in 2007.

As it stands, the core of BookFinder.com is ISBN-13 compliant, but not all the interfaces by which we search and exchange data with our bookseller partners are ready.

February 07, 2006

I just finished reading Vikram Seth’s double-biography Two Lives, about the lives of his Indian uncle and Jewish German aunt. Published by forward-thinking HarperCollins, the book’s copyright page lists both the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13:

ISBN-10: 0-06-59966-9ISBN-13: 978-0-06-59966-9

Unfortunately, the ISBN-10 is only nine digits long, and the ISBN-13 is twelve. No, it’s not the checksum that’s missing, but the leading “0” in the item number. Thankfully, the ISBN listed on the book jacket has it right:

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-059966-9ISBN-10: 0-06-059966-9

The ISBN-13 transition will undoubtedly be full of small errors like this, confirming the natural skepticism of used and rare booksellers toward software and systems that lock users into the ISBN system.

January 26, 2006

I spent a week and a half in Oman in December and January. Oman is a Gulf state of 3 million people, located to the east of Saudi Arabia. I really enjoyed my trip, meeting people, seeing the dramatic beaches and mountains, and having some of my stereotypes about the region challenged.

I made a few attempts to find local lit while I was there, but I didn’t find anything very interesting in English—either translations or original work. Bookstores featured lots of titles by international writers, but local English-language offerings were limited largely to nonfiction work about the country’s history and economy, coffee table photography books directed at tourists, and a smattering of memoirs by international expats. I’m sure the local Arabic-language literary scene was far richer than what I was seeing, but it was disappointing not to be able to access it. I can understand why there wouldn’t be a large body of translated work in a nation with such a small population.

Geeky book industry humor—I was amused to find a book from an Omani publisher sporting an EAN/ISBN-13 barcode reading 978000000033. Converted to a 10-digit ISBN, that reads as 0000000035, or 000000003 if one omits the checksum. The publisher was asserting that their book was something like the third ISBN ever issued, misunderstanding or misusing the ISBN system. (This was presumably the third book they’d published with an EAN barcode.) A web search indicated that Oman doesn’t seem to have a listed ISBN agency, so perhaps local publishers are in a bind, having to use fake ISBNs to work with retailers demanding EAN barcodes.